Jasmine is concerned with practical, tactical ways to bolster employee engagement, diversity and ultimately improve organisational cultures. She gives actionable advice to help HR professionals improve their organisations one step at a time and is known as a trainer, consultant and public speaker. Prior to moving to London in 2008, she was a professor teaching international business majors at the State University of New York. Her clients include PepsiCo, CBI, HarperCollins and Prudential. Jasmine’s book, ‘Employee Engagement: a little book of Big Ideas,‘ is available to buy.

I admit it, watching Jimmy Fallon’s lip-sync battles on Youtube started as procrastination.

I found myself laughing uncomfortably in particular as I watched Will Ferrell lip sync to Beyoncé’s Drunk in Love. In his dad-jeans, his white trainers, and his over-sized sweatshirt, there was something discomfiting about his intense stare, and his perfect impersonation of Beyoncé’s moves.

Where those moves look fierce and sexy when Beyoncé performs them, Ferrell draws laughs because he looks like an idiot performing them, or someone who is a bit mad, and maybe a little intimidating. He looks neither fierce nor sexy.

On the other hand, if Beyoncé acted like Ferrell – put on his outfit – you might just think, “oh, this must be her day off.” It wouldn’t be off-putting in the least.

But then, the anthropologist in me couldn’t help but kick in to analyse my discomfort…

I think it stems from this: what is at play here is a highlighting of unconscious bias – that if a woman acts in a highly sexualised way, we can read it as fierce, as strong. But when a man does it, we see it for what it is: a woman having to use her body to get what she wants, to be powerful.

This is a case of looking at the marked and unmarked cultural categories. In our Western culture, the white, straight man is the unmarked category – the test for identifying this is to put anyone in the typical outfit of the white straight man – Ferrell’s outfit for example, or a business suit – and nobody would find it odd.

The marked category, by contrast, is just that – marked as different from the unmarked – women mark themselves when they wear heels, skirts or make-up, religious people mark themselves physically too, and so on. We become very conscious of the marked categories when someone unmarked wears them. Think of all the disruption around transgender people right now – loosening the strictures of what marked and unmarked people can wear has shaken things up uncomfortably for some people.

So to come back to this clip, what Ferrell has done – knowingly or unknowingly – is donned the body language of a marked category (women), and exposed something about what our culture thinks about them.

In fact, quite a few (not all) of the lip-sync battles made me uncomfortable, as mostly white straight men took on the body language and signifiers of women, gay men, highly sexualised young women, highly sexualised young men, black men – for laughs.

“Taken-for-granted power differentials”

I think the ones that made me uncomfortable were when they exposed a taken-for-granted power differential, where the lip-syncer was of the dominant group, whether gender-, age-, or race-related.

The ones that didn’t make me uncomfortable were where it seemed clear that the person lip-syncing wasn’t playing up that dynamic.

Paul Rudd being Tina Turner, Tom Cruise being Meatloaf, Ellen and Rihanna, for example, or most of Jimmy Fallon’s impersonations. It was clear who would win out if those people really had to duke it out.

This is going on all the time. Most of the time, it’s unconscious. We’re not thinking of how we’re classifying people.

But in the workplace, this results in assumptions about how people should act (a recent article pointed out that mothers are paid less because, they’re less committed at work – obviously! At the same time, fathers are paid more, because obviously coming to work when they have kids, shows how committed to the workplace they are – obviously!).

And so, even when there are initiatives to ensure engagement by addressing diversity and inclusion, ultimately, they’ll fail if we don’t address the underlying bias that is just below the surface.

Have you had experiences of unconscious bias? Can you see the connection to employee engagement? What have you done to address unconscious bias in your workplace?